Winner of the Siegel/McDaniel Award 2024: Parables of Modern Belief in Philip Roth and Graham Greene

Abstract: This article makes a novel comparison between Philip Roth and Graham Greene, identifying instructive parallels between Roth’s short story “Eli the Fanatic” (1959) and Greene’s “The Hint of an Explanation” (1949). Both explore the tensions between belief, belonging, and modernity in the mid-twentieth century. Each presents an extended juxtaposition between traditional belief and modern unbelief, and, in similar parabolic style, attempts to address that classic theological conundrum, the problem of evil. The two stories also suggest that a lack of belief has left the unbelieving characters without an adequate response to that problem. And so, seemingly inevitably, characters’ confrontations with evil lead them to an encounter with the divine. Though Roth emphasizes the importance of the religious community and Greene the individual’s conviction of religious truth, both stories identify and mourn the failure of modernity to offer an adequate response to human suffering. Greene’s story ultimately illuminates the underexamined theological concerns of Roth’s text—the ways in which “Eli, the Fanatic” remains unique in Roth’s oeuvre for taking matters of belief seriously on their own terms.